1 What is known of Arctic kelps?

1.1 Known

  • Little is known of kelp in the Arctic

1.2 Past

  • Trading in Alaria along Baffin Island coast

1.3 Present

  • There should be other Laminariales sp.

1.4 Other

  • RWS: Other examples?

2 ArcticKelp project

  • There must be kelp in the Arctic
  • We don’t know what the drivers of their distributions are
  • The Arctic is changing quickly so we should figure this out ASAP
  • Where are kelp in the Arctic and what drives their distribution?

2.1 Campaigns

2.2 Sites

2.3 Mean cover

3 Environmental conditions

3.1 Abiotic data

  • NAPA (3-Oceans) model
    • Model outputs supplied by the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO)
    • Based on the NEMO community ocean model
    • Daily surface resolution; 1998 to 2015
    • Five day (pentad) resolution at 75 depth layers
    • Tri-polar grid
      • 10 to 20 km resolution

3.2 Biotic data

  • Bio-ORACLE
    • Collection of many different datasets
    • Most variables constrained to a 25km resolution Tyberghein et al. (2012)
      Assis et al. (2018)

4 Modelling distribution

  • A random forest model was used
  • Which variables are important?
  • What is the accuracy of the model?
  • What is the range in accuracy?
  • What is the distribution of inaccuracy?

4.1 Variables

Data layer Units Count
Phosphate concentration (mean at min depth) mol/m 1000
Ice concentration for categories % 1000
Ice fraction 1 1000
Sea ice thickness (mean) m 1000
Dissolved oxygen concentration (mean at min depth) mol/m 1000
Sea water temperature (mean at min depth) degrees Celcius 1000
divergence 1e-8s-1 998
Depth m 995
Sea ice thickness (range) m 992
wind stress module N/m2 988

4.2 Confidence

4.2.1 Total cover

4.2.2 Laminariales

4.2.3 Agarum

4.2.4 Alaria

5 Results

KFB: Show general kelp cover KFB: Drop Alaria if necessary

  • Note that the colour scales are not the same between figures

5.1 Total cover

5.2 Laminariales

5.3 Agarum

5.4 Alaria

6 Acknowledgements

Dr. Youyu Lu and Dr. Xianmin Hu for NAPA model access

This research was undertaken thanks in part to funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, through the Ocean Frontier Institute.

References

Assis, J., Tyberghein, L., Bosch, S., Verbruggen, H., Serrão, E. A., and De Clerck, O. (2018). Bio-oracle v2. 0: Extending marine data layers for bioclimatic modelling. Global Ecology and Biogeography 27, 277–284.

Tyberghein, L., Verbruggen, H., Pauly, K., Troupin, C., Mineur, F., and De Clerck, O. (2012). Bio-oracle: A global environmental dataset for marine species distribution modelling. Global ecology and biogeography 21, 272–281.